Intelligent Automation
Process is essential to achieving digital transformation. But the traditional focus of Business Process Management (BPM) has shifted. Digital Process Automation (DPA), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), machine learning/artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are rapidly increasing the complexity and sophistication of your digital transformation and becoming strategic to the future of your business. With the promise of automating those manual processes, technologies like DPA and RPA have the potential to deliver huge cost savings and efficiencies to business processes and operations.
A business process is a series of business activities that are performed in a specific order by a variety of applications, systems, employees, and external businesses. Examples of business processes include handling a purchase order from receipt through fulfillment, taking a product from inception to market, and preparing for a new employee. Business processes are more complex and long-running than application integrations and can include activities performed by humans.
Business process management enables you to automate business processes. For example, the process of preparing for a new employee could be automated as follows:
1. The hiring manager submits an online form that contains information about the new employee.
2. The submission of the form triggers the first step in the process. This step adds the employee's information to the internal human resources (HR) database and registers the employee in various systems and applications, such as the enterprise's e-mail application.
3. The next step in the process uses the enterprise's trading network to notify the external payroll company to set up an account for the employee.
4. The next step sends the facilities department a task to assign office space and provide office equipment before the employee's start date.
Business processes typically involve many variables and conditions, and the longer they run, the more likely the variables and conditions are to change. For example, a supplier might temporarily run out of parts needed to fill orders. Business process management enables you to act on running processes in response to such changes; in the example above, you could suspend order fulfillment processes until parts are available again.
Case management enables you to consolidate, manage, and process information about a complex problem or issue in a central collection point. That central collection point is called a case, where a case is a structured collection of information such as files, communications, records, emails, activities, tasks, and processes related to an issue, request, or incident that requires processing. In case management applications, users can collaborate to resolve cases and can define their own lightweight processes to guide the resolution. With SLA management, tasks are automatically created and monitored with escalation notifications. Integrated analytics, interactive dashboards, and reporting support business insights and improved decisions.
Dynamic case management features enable visual creation of fields, assembly of fields into forms, and assignment of forms to roles. You can provide standard processes that the case user can invoke, or you can create single tasks and multi-step tasks (processes) on the fly. Communication is enabled through channels such as forms, web portals, email, social networks, and mobile apps. Business rules evaluate content from channels and associate it with a case. Additional business rules constantly evaluate case content based on different scenarios or best practices and can perform processing on the case over time, such as updating record values, sending communications, starting or stopping processes, creating tasks, or assigning the case to different people or teams.
You can invoke a case from a business process. Conversely, you can invoke a business process from a case by mapping the case document to the process start document; the case status is updated with the process execution status.